Back to the crash in Germany – how DO you get out of a PA 28 in flight? Opening the door into the slipstream is far from easy, then you have to clamber out on the wing and let go. In the pictures it looks like the flaps were up, so couldn’t have flown at the very slowest speed either. Beats me…..
PS: It’s probably easier in a Cessna, where you can open the window and thus reduce the pressure on the door, also the door goes to floor level so you don’t have to climb up onto the wing.
Besides the Cirrus I also own a PA-28 Warrior.
It is definitely possible to a) fly the plane from the right seat, b) move over to the right seat from the left in flight and c) to open the door far enough to squeeze yourself out, especially below 80 knots.
So you think the pilot jumped out with a parachute?
I suppose it’s quite a good stunt, but surely it is easier to just travel conventionally and walk across borders. There are no physical borders anywhere in mainland Europe anymore. Maybe Russia still has them? By physical borders I mean the Iron Curtain sort, like I mentioned earlier. They cannot be crossed without special equipment or training. The whole W. Germany / DDR border was like that.
But now one can just walk across. You cannot drive a car across a real road border crossing but you can walk through the forest 1km off the road with a backpack, and a backpack is about all this guy could have jumped out with.
The whole flight was conducted within Germany, plane took off in Aachen EDKA, no border crossing.
It makes no sense … you don’t have to use a parachute. You can land such a Warrior on every field ….
I would say it was suicide …
I would say it was suicide …
Has a body been found?
No, but i think if you jump from (let’s say) 10 K ft the search area can be pretty big … and you don’t know how far the airplane flew without the pilot … could easily be 20 miles or more, of course depending on altitude
Flyer59 wrote:
could easily be 20 miles or more
Could be a lot more with an autopilot. Back in 1989, a Soviet MiG-23 flew some 500 NM without a pilot…
Not many bog-standard PA28s with an AP out there. Also, if you look at the video (linked in one of the first posts here), there doesn’t seem to be one installed. Police man interviewed says the pilot sent a distress message, but unverified. That’s kinda strange – either there was a Mayday call which would have been recorded by ATC or there wasn’t.
